PowerConnect Cloud Installation | PowerConnect Documentation

Overview

The PowerConnect Cloud software can be installed as a standalone agent or as a SAP Cloud Foundry application in BTP:

Standalone - the PowerConnect agent runs as a standalone piece of software. This requires a host (two for HA) running on-premises or in a cloud provider as infrastructure as a service.
SAP Cloud Foundry - the PowerConnect Cloud agent runs inside the Cloud Foundry stack. It uses Object Storage to persist its configuration and state.

Deployment Options

Type	High Availability	Volume	Data Transformation and Mapping Support	Input Types
Standalone	Yes - full clustering support with active active configuration	Supports high volume use cases - millions of events per day	Yes - user configurable field mapping and data transformation	All - supports both pull and push based inputs
Cloud Foundry	No - not supported inside Cloud Foundry	Supports high volume use cases up to the limit of a single instance	Yes - user configurable field mapping and data transformation	All - supports both pull and push based inputs
Modular Input (Deprecated and not supported anymore)	No - not supported by the modular input framework	Supports low to medium volume use cases - up to 100k events per day	No	Pull - supports only pull based inputs

Standalone Installation

Hardware Requirements

x86 64-bit chip architecture
4 CPU cores at 2GHz or greater
6GB RAM
1GB storage
A 1Gb Ethernet NIC
A 64-bit Linux distribution

Software Requirements

A modern 64 bit Linux distribution
Java 11 (OpenJDK or Oracle)
A modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc.)

Network Requirements

HTTP inbound on port 3000 to connect to the PowerConnect Cloud Web UI
HTTPS outbound on port 443 to connect to SAP Cloud
HTTP or HTTPS outbound on port 8088 to connect to the Splunk HTTP Event Collector (Splunk on premises or Splunk Cloud)
TCP 5701 between PowerConnect Cloud agent nodes if running as a cluster

Pre-Installation Steps

Create a directory on the target server where the PowerConnect Cloud software will be installed

sudo mkdir /opt/powerconnect

Create a group for the powerconnect user

sudo groupadd powerconnect

Create a user on the target server that will own and run the PowerConnect Cloud software

sudo useradd -m -g powerconnect -d /opt/powerconnect powerconnect

Set the default shell to bash for the powerconnect user

sudo usermod --shell /bin/bash powerconnect

Make sure the PowerConnect user has full ownership of the PowerConnect directory

sudo chown -R powerconnect:powerconnect /opt/powerconnect

Installation Steps

Download the PowerConnect Cloud package tarball file
Copy the tarball file to the target server where PowerConnect Cloud will run

scp powerconnect-cloud-1.0.0.tgz <target-server>:/tmp

Login to the target server as the PowerConnect user
Unpack the package to the PowerConnect folder

tar -zxvf powerconnect-cloud-1.0.0.tgz -C /opt/powerconnect

Switch to the PowerConnect folder

cd /opt/powerconnect

Make sure PowerConnect Cloud start script is executable

chmod +x bin/powerconnect.sh

Set the POWERCONNECT_SECRET environment variable. This is used by the keystore where client ids and secrets are stored.

export POWERCONNECT_SECRET=<secret>

Make a note of this secret as it’s required each time the PowerConnect Cloud Agent is started

Start PowerConnect Cloud

bin/powerconnect.sh start

Browse to http://<powerconnect-server>:3000 to access the PowerConnect Cloud web UI. Use the default admin/admin username and password for first-time access (be sure to change it)!

SAP Cloud Foundry Installation

Installation Steps

Download the PowerConnect Cloud SAP Cloud Foundry package and manifest file
Make sure you have the Cloud Foundry command line tools installed
Copy the PowerConnect Cloud package and manifest file to a folder for deployment

Modify the manfiest file and enter a password for the POWERCONNECT_SECRET environment variable

---
applications:

- name: powerconnect-cloud
  memory: 1024M
  timeout: 300
  random-route: true
  path: ./powerconnect-cloud.zip
  buildpacks:
    - https://github.com/cloudfoundry/java-buildpack.git#4.77.0
  env:
    POWERCONNECT_SECRET: <insert password here>
    JBP_CONFIG_OPEN_JDK_JRE: "jre: { version: 11.+ }"
    JBP_CONFIG_DIST_ZIP: "arguments: ['start']"

If required update the memory settings, by default the manifest will create a 1GB instance
Deploy the package
```
cf push
```
After a minute or two the process should finish and the PowerConnect Cloud agent should be in “started” state
The Cloud Foundry environment does not have persistent storage so we need to use the SAP Object Storage service for the PowerConnect Cloud agent to be able to persist its configuration
Follow the documentation here to create an object store service and bind it to the PowerConnect Cloud app - https://help.sap.com/doc/3e17a6e11f3e46f4af9f33387471e3e0/Cloud/en-US/ObjectStore-EN.pdf
Once the Object Store service has been bound to the PowerConnect Cloud app restage the app
```
cf restage powerconnect-cloud
```
The PowerConnect Cloud application should now be running and leveraging object storage as it’s datastore
```
cf env
```

Get the url that the PowerConnect Cloud agent UI is running on
```
cf apps
```

Copy the value under routes and paste into your web browser and the PowerConnect Cloud UI should be displayed